When I was Oregon labor commissioner, I used to tell my fellow Republican (who always complained about "union bosses" who were out of touch with their membership) that union leaders are chosen in a far more democratic process than corporate directors and managers and that, by and large, union leaders did in fact represent their members.

Now it's also true that union members select their leadership primarily for their effectiveness working on union business, not their political activities. That's why a lot of union members don't follow their union's political endorsements, but that's very different from saying the union leadership doesn't represent the membership on bargaining and other union issues.

I do think a lot of unions are stuck fighting the old battles of organization and wage & benefit packages (which, obviously, are still important to members) and have failed to address the bigger question of how labor and management work together to make union businesses more competitive.

Too many union folks are hung up on what workers deserve rather than demonstrating that collective bargaining can actually make the workforce more productive by improving skills, reducing turnover, reducing absenteeism, etc.

I think unions, and the economy generally, would benefit if unions spent less time trying to make people use union labor and more time working on convincing people that it is smart for them (as employers, contractors, customers, etc.)to use union labor. I've longed believed that it is easier to get people to do what is in their best interest than convince them they should do something because it is in your best interest.

collective bargaining can actually make the workforce more productive by improving skills, reducing turnover, reducing absenteeism, etc.

Thanks for making this point, Jack. It only makes sense that workers who are taken care of are the ones who stick around, have a better safety record, more training, etc. AFSCME did some neat things with OHSU to improve skills and efficiencies.

"...to today's liberal push for a greater alliance between big business and government." Does the Bush Adsministration, with it's cadre of corporate executives turned department/agency heads, and it's deep love of corporate lobbyist money, realize it's just a tool of the "Liberal Push"? Jeez, if a "Liberal" is elected President, will the first order of business be to invade Poland and round up the Gypsy hoards? What utter hogwash. Pure, unadulterated, weapons-grade Baloneium. It was no utopia for my relatives in Germany and Hungary in the late 30's & early 40's when they were rounded up and murdered by the Nazis. A far cry from FDR and the CCC, Social Security and the New Deal, the programs that led to the unprecedented growth of the middle class in the 50's till the early 80s.

<s>Im</s>Peccably [look it up] researched and <s>persuasively</s> argued, Liberal Fascism will elicit howls of <s>indignation</s> laughter from the liberal establishment.

At least until some moron of a publisher gives Goldberg an even bigger platform than a column in The Los Angeles Times. Talk about falling upward.

Union membership doesn't appear to benefit the kids who attend public schools.

I hate this statement. I am a member of the OEA and our local after being the President of AFTRA in my former life as a Portland broadcaster. My union actually continues to fight over the unfunded yet mandated NCLB. My membership in the NEA/OEA does benefit my students by fighting to make college more affordable. My union is finding ways to keep kids from dropping out of school. The NEA/OEA is working to reduce class sizes so we can actually work with individual students so we can teach everyone student equally. My membership leads to ensuring high quality teachers are in the classroom.

Unions work for the betterment of all workers. Instead of arguing against union affiliation why not work to make sure everyone who works is treated with dignity, is given the benefits they deserve, and is appreciated for the work they do for the company.

Yeah t., the boss is always right, workers never had any problems with adequate pay, reasonable hours, fair use of supervisor and employer power, or health and safety before unions came along and ruined the free market paradise.

Teachers' work is systematically undervalued and subject to major free-rider problems from cheapskate anti-taxers who don't want to pay the freight for necessary public services from which they benefit. Teachers also need protection from attacks from people like those who backed the OCA in the early 1990s.

Insofar as poor teaching is an issue, and it is much exaggerated by the knee-jerk right wing, often poor morale is a factor, especially in schools with inadequate resources which are asked to be panacea cures for complicated social problems. Treating teachers as rhetorical punching bags isn't going to change that.

If we got rid of teachers' unions, so principals or school boards could fire them at will, regardless of the competence of the principals or school boards, and the anti-taxers could cut their salaries and benefits at will, do you really think education would improve? No. It would just get harder to get good teachers.

Of course the anti-taxers don't really want good public education. They want to wreck the public schools out of knee-jerk ideology and favoritism for more advantages for the the best off.

The right to associate to bargain collectively is a human right. Get over it.

Insofar as poor teaching is an issue, and it is much exaggerated by the knee-jerk right wing, often poor morale is a factor, especially in schools with inadequate resources which are asked to be panacea cures for complicated social problems. Treating teachers as rhetorical punching bags isn't going to change that.

messiur t cited an example and asked two questions. You answered neither one of them. instead going off on the standard:

"Why is everybody always picking on me" rant.

You needn't be anti-union to see the need for tweaking the system for a possible better result.

Answering questions by attacking the questioner and refusing to answer does no service to the union cause. If you guys would own up to the possibility that there is some room for improvement in the public employee sector rules regarding labor, and that good suggestions might come from outside of your own world, you might gain some credibility and as a bonus, some additional allies.

Pat, I'm not a teacher, but I am a public school parent who is grateful that my kid has had great teachers who are supported by a principal who works with the teachers and an active parent community -- my recipe for successfull schools -- & have also been a teacher of a graduate class in which I had a Jefferson High teacher as a student.

I didn't answer the questions directly because I think they are intellectually dishonest as posed, involving a non-sequitur -- signficant but limited problems in a part of the system lead to the conclusion that unions are simply bad. Against the anecdote of the abusive janitor (if we accept that one version) we have the situation in Portland in which the school board illegally fired all of the custodial staff for no reason and hired outside contractors who did a worse job in pursuit of a false economy.

Miles' questions are more reasonable although to begin with I'm not sure I'd want to make firing "easy." Part of the difficulty with schools is that we have two layers of highly autonomous authority: teachers in their classrooms and principals in their schools. So how should each level be held accountable for their use of that autonomy, and how should those affected (kids in classes and teachers & kids in schools) be protected from abuses or failures in the exercise? Maybe "easier." But not "easy."

There is also the difficulty that kids do vary in their abilities and the resources and backgrounds they bring with them to school. I think this is part of the problem behind "merit pay." My wonderful absolutely committed Jefferson high standards creative demanding fiercely loyal teacher/grad student may not have had students whose average results as classes would compare to the average results of classes at Lincoln (sorry for the Portland refs Pat) but I would bet money that she made more difference in the lives of at least some of her students and produced better average results than many other teachers would have with the same (lack of) resources, political- administrative turmoil, racial suspicions. How does her merit in those difficult circumstances get measured? How can we tell if I'm right that she did superior work with those classes of students than another teacher would have?

Miles your best point in my view is that in order to make such changes successfully they would have to get buy-in from the teachers themselves and be based on teachers' understandings of what goes wrong. In response to your questions I'd want to know if school systems ever ask for proposals from teachers in their unions about such matters, vs. to what degree part of the problem is also jealous guarding of perceived management prerogatives.

Most teachers want to be good teachers, want to be successful at their work, want their kids to succeed, and want their fellow teachers to be good and successful because the quality of their fellow teachers' work affects their own ability to succeed. But there's a big difference between defining the problem as "how can we make conditions that enable teachers and students to be successful in achieving the learning we want?" vs. "how can we get rid of (allegedly) incompetent teachers?"

gotta run & pick up my kid

OK. I get it that the first rule of Fight Club is that no one talks about Fight Club.

Wake me up when the lovely Ms. Sargent puts up a post that has one non-defensive sentence or, alternatively when some teacher's union member or supporter ventures to point out that the entire system is not absolutely perfect beyond any need for improvement.

I know about NAFTA, offshoring jobs, employer dirty tricks (of which I have been a personal victim), and the determination internationally to destroy union efforts, often through use of murder as a tactic.

I have also been victimized by union workers, some of whom, you may be surprised to learn, are just as sleazy, lazy, and dishonest as some employers, what with all parties being human beings and all.

It defies rational discourse to assert that there is not a single bad actor in the union ranks, and thus no need to address performance beyond clinging blindly to the senority system.

Back in the '80s when Reagan really started encouraging the destruction of private sector blue collar unions, a lot of my fellow workers (many from multi-generational union families) were happy to support him because of some of these issues.

You will continue to shrink until you can at least uderstand that the perseption of fair play is as important to many of us as the size of our paychecks.

Silly us. We believe that some peole are actually more dedicated and harder working than their fellows and deserve to be recognized for it.

Pat, Sorry my last message was so long and rambling but I did say that teachers may abuse their autonomy in the classroom.

However, the discourse around this stuff is overwhelmingly to act as if only teachers are human and imperfect (or, in workplace settings, as if only pro-union workers are).

I was agreeing with Miles that it is reasonable to question whether some things might be improved if teachers' through their unions approached some issues differently. Even better was his suggestion that making counter-proposals on some questions that emerge out of the unions would be a good strategy. But whether or not they initiate them, if you really want to get that done in order to improve education, you have to have the teachers actively involved in the discussion with a real voice in shaping whatever reforms. You don't start out with a grossly prejudiced and false premise and accusations and then blame people (only human) for being defensive.

Miles thinks the issue is with union leaders or staff. I actually am somewhat skeptical of this. The "no merit pay" position seems to me rather like the "last hired first fired" seniority principle which got ingrained as a rule of fairness and a protection against management favoritism, manipulation and anti-union actions during the great depression of the 1930s.

I taught for a while at a private college in Portland in which faculty pay has a regular promotion schedule, which sometimes gets across the board raises (i.e. the whole schedule goes up) and through which individuals advance based on evaluations by an elected faculty committee. They are not automatic, nor is promotion in rank, so all step increases in some sense are merit increases, but merit increases are also the overwhelming norm.

In addition faculty can get "double merit" extraordinary increases, which are much less common. Even when all of this is handled by a faculty committee it can get fairly politicized. If it were in the hands of a single administrator I'm sure it would be a serious problem at least periodically.

So if we're seriously interested in merit pay as some sort of tool to improve education, and not just as a rhetorical bomb to throw (see, they don't want merit pay, they don't care about quality of teaching), we have to think about how that would work. Do you want to reward just a few extraordinary teachers extra? How is that actually going to change anything for or about the rest of the teachers?

Do you want to say "our normal expectation is that teachers should be good enough to deserve merit increases, but if you fall below a certain standard, you won't get one" as at the college I mentioned? This seems more likely to me to be effective. What should the standards be? Who should administer them? How will fairness be ensured? What kinds of action are we trying to encourage that produce more successful learning? Should the standards be statewide? Districtwide? Within a specific school? Some combination?

Conversely to Miles' point that maybe the teachers should propose their own versions, maybe people who really want to use pay as a tool to improve education should get off the hot button term "merit pay" with its (often deliberately) insulting implications that most teachers aren't meritorious & talk about say "achievement pay."

More broadly, if you go back to Jack Roberts' very early comment it apparently only is workers who should sacrifice their self-interests for the sake of productivity, competitiveness, etc., not managers or investors. Actually of course U.S. workers have made huge gains in productivity since 1970 almost all of which have gone to management and investors.

she spent two years building a file on her JANITOR before terminating him (he was hispanic, and hated working for a woman).

Um, what?! I sure do hope that the reality isn't what seems to be posted here - that he was being terminated because he was Hispanic.

More broadly, if you go back to Jack Roberts' very early comment it apparently only is workers who should sacrifice their self-interests for the sake of productivity, competitiveness, etc., not managers or investors.

Which, of course, is not what I was saying at all. My point is not that unions shouldn't bargain for their members' wages, benefits, etc., but that they should also be working with management to demonstrate their company's greater productivity, competitiveness, etc., in part because of a workforce that is well-compensated, treated fairly, and which has a positive and effective voice in the overall management and direction of the company.

Incidentally, so-called merit pay programs have a really mixed record even in non-union, private sector companies. They tend to be a demoralizing influence on those who don't get the raise while it is quickly taken for granted by those who receive them. It has not been shown to spur greater effort or superior performance in most cases.

Part of the problem is the difficulty in fairly measuring "merit" except in those jobs where performance is easily guaged by strict qualitative measures largely unaffected by outside factors. Those jobs are rarer and rarer in the U. S. economy. In too many other jobs, "merit" pay too often becomes "arbitrary" pay and a source of more discontent among workers than an incentive to better performance.

Chris,

if you really want to get that done in order to improve education, you have to have the teachers actively involved in the discussion with a real voice in shaping whatever reforms

Sure. I'd agree with that. In general, any program overlaid onto an existing situation would require a lot of input from stakeholders. Since we're Blue Skying here, how about including some student representation, maybe get some Honors Kids that have demonstrated a committment to their own excellence, to offer their views on what worked for them.

The good teachers that I had were good enough, but unmemorable. The great teachers that I've had (young, old, male, female) I remember across thirty-five years.

What were they doing better? A whole lot of different things.

One example: Mr. Logan, College prep US History. I'm the mouthy know it all punk coming in, having done a lot of coasting based on reading and comprehension skills.

First question I answer, he ridicules my answer. Tells me to get my butt down to the library and come back with a solidly researched answer. Pissed me off.

He only gave out three As among scores of students. I made damned sure to get one of 'em. He read me, challenged me, and rewarded me when I responded. It was the perfect way to handle me in particular.

Mr. Logan retired a couple of years ago, but he is a legend in the area where I attended high school.

"last hired first fired" seniority principle which got ingrained as a rule of fairness and a protection against management favoritism

Another superannuated concept that immediately led to broad nepotism and quickly became a counter-incentive to productivity at least in the blue collar side on things. Also created huge resentment among the workers who were frozen out in favor of relatives and friends.

There are always 5 to 10% of the crew that have some connection that precludes their having to do any actual work. Admittedly their counterparts on the non-union side are people who have an in with management and thus don't need to work. That said, in the union example, these bastards are protected structurally. In the non-union example, they are protected by members of management who are sacrificing their own bottom line for whatever reward the personal relationship provides.

(Yeah, this is a little off base as an analogy to the education environment, but I think it applies.)

Kari,

No Dude, it's not that he's hispanic. It's that he's (allegedly) sexist. That problem is very real for women in management. I've watched my wife stuggle with this from when she was on teams, (The Little Cutie to be humored) to team leadership, (The undeserving Little Cutie that got the position rightfully belong to me) to running her own firm (The unfair Ball Buster, who's exploiting my skills). There are a lot of guys out there who can't ever accept a woman as a superior in an org and will work day in and day out to sabotage that person.

Jack,

so-called merit pay programs have a really mixed record even in non-union, private sector companies

Right you are Jack. What I'm suggesting is not necessarily about compensation. It's about recognition of outstanding behavior, exceptional skills, or innovative ideas. How that recognition occurs, I'm not sure, but I'm aware that overall, wages are less of an incentive in the workplace than recognition of accomplishments, however that would be designed.

Pat,

I'm not sure there's a word you just wrote that I'd disagree with and it hardly seems worth the energy to seek one out.

My point about "last hired first fired" & its analogy to "merit pay" for teachers was directed at Miles' hypothesis that it's teacher union officials and staffs who drive opposition to "merit pay." I think the pressure actually comes from rank & file culture about what's fair and what is susceptible to unfair manipulation. So if they're really causing more problems now than the ones that gave rise to them, changing them probably has to invoke a different sense of fairness and at least provide adequate protection of whatever they're defending.

Last hired first fired worked in a certain way in depression circumstances, protecting older workers with families among other things. When post-war well-paid manufacturing jobs were expanding on the whole & lay-offs were temporary it didn't cause many problems, had a logic and the imprimatur of tradition. It started to have really divisive kinds of consequences when the relative equalization of the job market opportunities compared to historical racial, ethnic and sex discriminations happened unfortunately to correspond to the levelling-off and then decline of such well-paying jobs. It also put the unions (esp. industrial unions) in a contradiction between their policy support for civil rights and internal practices.

Jack, I apologize for misinterpreting you; in future if I read a partial statement on this subject like the one you started with I will understand it as shorthand for a more rounded perspective. Also I was glad to read it as this corresponds more to my understanding of where you were coming from as labor commissioner, when I wasn't seeing your more partisan side as manifested sometimes in discussions here. Nothing wrong with that, & you are serious and substantial for the most part, but it was different. But I'm glad I wasn't just imagining things before.

Merit pay...ah...one of those issues that sounds good at first but the devil is in the details.

So, what happens when you have an excellent teacher. He or she shows that the class has high scores on test results, the teacher writes many successful grants, is published, writes legislation for school safety that is passed, but the school administrator doesn't like the fact that teacher is active in the union and coordinates grievances against the principal? Since the principal, in theory, decides on the merit pay, what do you think happens?

Unions do operate for the greater good. You have insurance, sick leave, vacation, etc. because union members fought to make that happen. Making sure employees are given fair treatment is because of unions.

If the general public laughs at the unions why don't they remember what union members before helped them receive even without organizing?